Mar 04, 2022     Fuse holder install and wiring - (2 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

Had an order from AirCraft Spruce Arrive. This gave me the replacement fuse holders and miscellaneous pieces I was waiting for.

Installed new fuse holders into panel. Wired up remaining connections to match the panel as I received it.

  Feb 26, 2022     Retract Electrical Panel - (4 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

Was away from the project for a few weeks but have come back to tackle another challenging section. The electrical panel for the retracts.

Currently I don't understand the electrical system for the retract motor. Some basics that I do understand:

1. The retract motor is designed to only turn one way. The motor turns the gear system to retract the landing gear and stops at the gearbox rotation that puts the gear in the full up position.
2. To extend, the gearbox continues to rotate past the full up position, beginning the extension of the gear legs.
3. There are upper travel switches and lower travel switches on each of the gearboxes. The trip point of each of these switches are fully adjustable. Each side works in series to set the stopping point of the travel.
4. The gear is retracted (and extended) with a push button. Pushing the button causes the retract motor to spin.
5. There are squat switches in each of the gear legs. Unfortunately the switch in one leg doesn't work and it is not accessible or repairable without destroying the gear leg assembly. Maintenance and repair wasn't considered when this part was designed.

Some design unknowns:
1. I've had the motor checked out and it appears to be in working but it requires some capacitors and such to work. There are some capacitors on the retract electrical panel but I don't know how they fit into the circuitry. I call these items capacitors but I'm not positive they are. Capacitors should have a capacitance rating on them in micro Farads. These ones don't.
2. There are some additional pieces that appear to be large diodes. How do they fit into the circuitry?
3. There are a couple of other unknown pieces. What are they? What do they do? I don't know. Yet.
4. There's a thermal relay that's part of the circuity. I opened it up and it's clean and functional. There are two separate thermal strips that when 12V is applied across either of them, the thermal strips bend away from the contact point of the circuit. In essence, each strip acts like a circuit breaker. This must trip a separate relay as the basic operation of this thermal relay would mean they would heat up and open the circuit, when they cooled they would automatically reset, closing the circuit, beginning the cycle over again. The heating cycle is very quick, within a second. The cooling cycle takes a few seconds. How and what this does, I've yet to figure out.
5. How do the squat switches fit into the circuitry? I expect they'll be in series to the retract function, but how?

Some operations unknowns:
1. Does the gear retract with the single push of the button or does it require a push and hold? One could argue advantages and disadvantages either way.
2. Do the travel switches trip a relay to cause the gear motor to stop or do those switches simply light up the landing gear indicator lights?

  Jan 31, 2022     More of the same - (5 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

Replaced old wires. Fixed broken lights. Cleaned up components. Connected and tested wiring. See picture of panel with landing gear lights lit up. The large, upper light is a rich red like the lower LH light as shown in the photo from Jan 29th. The colour of the picture is misleading. The upper light identifies when the landing gear is up and the smaller lower lights identify the individual gear being down (left and right). All three lights wouldn't normally be lit at the same time because the gear is either up or it's down. But all three light up when the previously mentioned lamp test switch is pressed. The yellow fuel pump light also works when tested and when the fuel pump is switched on. No photo for that. Removed old fuse holders and determined which could be reused and which needed replacing.

  Jan 30, 2022     Rear panel wiring continued - (1 hour) Category: Instrument Panel

Reinstalled some switches and lights. Replaced some more of the old wiring.

  Jan 29, 2022     Rear Panel Wiring - (5 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

As previously, removed one component at a time and cleaned up, tested, replaced, and rewired. The panel light for the generator (or alternator) was missing one of its contacts. I was able to fit a narrow strip of 0.010" brass fit in there perfectly and get the light working again. Continued replacing wiring one at a time. I'm not sure how the wiring all fits together yet, but at least I'll have the old replaced with new and I'll be able to continue tracing the electrical system. Some day I'll have it sorted.
The biggest part of the work was removing and disassembling the lamp test switch. That is, the momentary push switch to test the functionality of all the lights in the panel. Since all the lights are incandescents, this is important to ensure they are functioning. The switch is an assembly of 4 separate DPST momentary switches. The circuitry wasn't obvious until most of the old wiring was removed and I could get a close look at the switch. Cleaned and lubed the switch and got it functioning perfectly. Replaced all the wires with new with lengths and connections to match the originals.

Removed some of the fuse holders. Most of these were damaged. Fuse holders are cheap so I'll replace them. The fuse holder for the trim servo was odd in that its housing was larger than its neighbouring fuses. I'd noticed this previously and was hoping I'd figure out why. I believe I now know why. I suspect that when the plane was built, they ran out of the normal fuse holders and substituted this larger one in for the trim servo. The hole in the panel was crudely cut. It looks like someone at the factory 50 years ago used a rough round file to enlarge the hole. It is nothing like the perfectly cut out holes for all the other fuses and components.

  Jan 26, 2022     Sorting out the wiring of the rear panel - (3.5 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

Spent quite a bit of time trying to sort out the wiring of the rear panel. The existing wiring is a real rats nest. It wasn't bundled as nicely as the front panel wiring. That's one of the interesting things about this aircraft; some of the workmanship is incredible with no expense or effort spared, where as some of the workmanship looks rushed with minimal care and attention.
Since some of the remaining wires have tags with handwritten numbers on them, I've started a spreadsheet to compare those numbers to the numbers on the electrical panel. Hoping they'd all correspond and make sense would help the wiring process significantly. Unfortunately there have been a few wires that share the same number as other wires. And these are wires that have no reason to be associated with the other similarly numbered wire.

Due to the mess of wires that I need to retain for understanding, I started pulling individual switches, their corresponding wires and started cleaning and replacing. As each component was cleaned, inspected, worked on and replaced wires. I reinstalled the component before moving on to the next one. I got about a third of the wiring replaced. This is all the easier wiring with the crimped connectors. The soldered wires and damaged components have yet to be tackled.

  Jan 25, 2022     Further cleaning - (2.5 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

Finished cleaning the tabs on the electrical panel, all 65 pairs of tabs.

While in the cleaning mood, I directed my attention to the electric trim indicator. The chrome ring around the gauge had a lot of grime and tarnishing. The brass body of the gauge was well tarnished too. Not anymore though. :-)

Did I need to polish the body? No, I didn't. But you got to admit, it looks a lot better now.

  Jan 24, 2022     Electrical panel clean up - (1 hour)       Category: Instrument Panel

The original electrical panel is a beautiful fabrication of brass tabs, rivets with numbers etched into them, and phenolic sheet. 50 years of dirt, grime, and surface oxidation has turned the brass tabs to dark, barely recognizable, tabs.
Cleaning the brass is important. It's not just for looks, but it will allow better electrical conductivity. The dirt and oxidation would certainly have added resistance to the loop and may have prevented passing of the electrons altogether.
Using a Dremel tool with a polishing tip and some metal polish has made this doable.

  Dec 10, 2021     Misc Panel and control stuff - (2 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

Decided to keep the original slip indicator in its original position, i.e. inverted on the front panel. For the rear panel, I'm using a new slip indicator that I already have. This new indicator is narrower than the original so this meant fabricating a mounting plate to attach to the original holes in the panel and the indicator to mount to it. I cut out the mounting plate from 0.125" sheet, drilled and tapped some 10-32 holes for the indicator screws to mount to. Notched the mounting plate to allow the slip indicator to sit as close as possible to the original panel. See attached pics. Also trimmed the new slip indicator so that the edges were flush and suitable for this new installation. See pics.
Mounted a microswitch for automatic fuel pump. This is a switch that will automatically turn on the fuel boost pump when the throttle is pulled back. Beautifully made mount, very simple concept, one of Dalotel's better ideas.

  Dec 10, 2021     Wiring and misc - (2 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

Added an additional coax cable to the front panel for the headset/microphone pair. There was one coax already but needed to add a second. Fortunately, there were some empty pins on the Jaeger connector.
Also added an additional wire for CHT gauge that I added, again using an empty pin on the Jaeger connector.

Lastly, I spent some time fixing a safety wire that I had mis-wired on the retract motor. Rob is a fellow Dalotel enthusiast out of the US and he's been following the restoration. Rob noticed an issue with one of my safety wires and shared the attached photo. I don't know how I let that mis-wiring happen, but I did. It's good to have a second or third set of eyes to review things. Thanks Rob. The retract motor had been reinstalled in the fuselage so access to this wire was limited. There was just enough access to entice me to try without removing the motor. Notice that the holes for the safety wire aren't on the side of the screw head. They are closer to the rounded top. This made wrapping the safety wire around the screw very difficult, especially with the limited accessibility. The wire kept slipping off the edge and pulling over the head of the screw. It took a few tries but I was eventually able to get it. Due to the limited access, I couldn't get a reasonable picture of the corrected wiring. You'll have to take my word for it. ;-)

  Dec 05, 2021     Cleaned up forward instrument panel - (1 hour)       Category: Instrument Panel

Having reviewed some of the original pictures, I realized that some of the instruments had been moved around. I recall Ray saying he'd relocated some of them to make them more convenient. Knowing that few things are convenient on this airplane, I'll put them back in their original position. Not that many would know. But hey, I have to try for some level of authenticity.

The most useful picture of the original panel is attached. The layout of the instruments matches those from other, less clear photos.
A few things worth noting:

Front Panel:
1. The front panel is missing an instrument in the top left corner. All photos showing the original plane, and the way the panel was received suggest that this hole was never filled. I've installed a spare CHT gauge that I have. Useful information. There are some spare pins on the Jeager connector that I can use, so everything will be bundled as before.
2. The small gauge on the lower right hand corner of the front panel is missing. It's a pressure gauge, likely manifold pressure, since it's reading close to 1000 mBar in the photo. Since a manifold pressure gauge isn't critical on an engine with a fixed pitch prop, I've installed a very useful Ammeter instead. Fortunately, I had an extra one sitting around from a previous project and there's already extra wiring from the Jaeger connector.
3. Just to the left of the above mentioned pressure gauge, is a small hole labelled "CASQUE". There is a similar hole on the rear panel in the same location. Using google translate, CASQUE translates to "HELMET". Having thought that the hole was a light, I couldn't understand what it was for, until I reviewed the attached picture again. When zoomed in, they appear to be some sort of plug in. My "Aha" moment came in the middle of the night. They were the plug in for the headsets. They didn't use the dual plug system that's now the standard worldwide. I'll have to make some modification.
4. The slip indicator on the front panel is mounted upside down. This presumably is to assist in keeping things centred when flying inverted. The rear panel has the slip indicator mounted right side up. Unfortunately, the slip indicator on the rear panel was removed years ago and is long gone.
Having flown a lot of aerobatics, I can say that a slip indicator is useless when inverted. When flying inverted, you're not trying to keep the plane balanced and centred. After all, if you're inverted, you're flying aerobatics and you're likely tossing the plane around.
Since the plane is over 50 years old and I'm not going to get the plane cleared for aerobatics, I was tempted to mount the slip indicator right side up. But in interest of authenticity, I might leave it inverted and mount a second one right side up on the rear panel. Again, I have a spare one from a previous project. Of course, it won't be authentic, so what do I do? Original upright, or original inverted and a new one upright?

Rear Panel:
5. The original compass is missing. I have a replacement in my collection. Yay. Not a perfect match, but the chance of finding a compass identical to the original is slim.
6. The original altimeter was missing from the rear panel. Not a big issue. I have a replacement in my collection. Besides the original altimeter read in kilometres. Since the standard in aviation is to refer to altitude in feet, it's an important safety factor to have an altimeter in feet.
7. The original ASI from the rear panel is missing. I know that it was on the airplane when Ray received the project. If my buddy Ray can track that instrument down, I'll reuse it. It's in km/h, which is abnormal, but comparing measured speed with other aircraft is not important except for bragging rights. Knowing where you are within the plane's performance limits is what matters. The units aren't critical. I have a spare ASI in knots and MPH that will work and the range is suitable for this aircraft.
8. The radio is long gone. I wouldn't have been able to use it anyway, even if it had worked. It likely emitted so much stray signal and EMI that it would likely sterilize the pilot or create a tumour. I'm considering installing a Trig TY91 remote radio instead. I have one in my 1-Design and it's a wonderful unit. It fits nicely in a small and shallow panel. It's designed to fit into a 2-1/4" instrument hole. There's a spare hole there where the G-meter went, beside the compass.
9. The G-meter is missing. Fortunately, I have a spare! Although it's a 3-1/8". But that could fit into the old radio location if I choose to use it. I might not though as its presence might encourage aerobatic flying. To be decided.

  Dec 03, 2021     Cleaned up fuel and oil gauges - (1 hour)       Category: Instrument Panel

Polished up the fuel and pressure gauges. The chromed outer ring looked like it was starting to pit and rust from underneath the chrome. As it turned out, it was just age and dirt and tarnish. A little bit of metal polish and some time with the dremel and a polishing tip resulted in a few shiny gauges.